>It's not totally obvious to me that random hiring would be worse

Does this have some implied conditions I'm missing? Because to me it seems absolutely obvious that filtering for people who have experience/a degree will vastly improve your outcome over true random hiring.

A lot of things seem obvious but aren't actually true. Plenty of people with degree and experience coasted on nothing, or have personalities so abrasive as to make working with them all but impossible. Disappointingly I have poor experience with degrees actually instilling any sense of diligence, or even research capabilities, thus making them questionable even when recruiting for fields such as R&D, where it should be truly an obvious choice. At least a retrained nurse has some basic curiosity and a critical eye, though it's a bit of a shame, what with the nursing staff shortage.

And, also personally, I've had great experience with people who migrated from absolutely unrelated fields (e.g. several people who retrained - within same company - from support into software development). Similarly I had great experience with fresh interns turning out to be brilliant theory people.

Right. It logically follows that random applying would be a good strategy: selecting randomly from top-paying jobs, you would reply to job offers for e.g. software engineer, brain surgeon, architect or hedge fund manager, to increase the chances of being randomly hired.

That is effectively how I got my last 2 jobs in software engineering. Picking a few keywords and spamming out your resume seems the only way to match the equivalent efforts from recruiters.

>That is effectively how I got my last 2 jobs in software engineering

Are you saying that you had no qualifications at all before? Because that's what they're saying, just applying for any high-paying job, even if you don't have the requirements.

I mean my anecdata to serve as a realistic example of the hyperbolic concept of just wildly applying anywhere at random.

In both cases, I was switching industries (from ASIC design to IoT cloud software to data analytics). So, I arguably had some qualifications and arguably none at all.

Can you tell how fast did you acclimate and how did your employer look at this?